From Pinoyexchange:
Great stuff, Loonz. Plus, O'Hara's visual intelligence is at work there. Far as I can remember, every shot in the film from beginning onwards was a long shot, the camera keepign its distance as if clinically observing the characters...up to a point: when Nora finally softens towards Dennis, stops seeing him as a strange and possibly dangerous creature and starts looking at him as a person, O'Hara suddenly cuts to a closer shot--the first in the film--of Nora looking at Dennis in a new light, with affection, the tentative beginnings of love.
The storytelling here is so perfect, in terms of camerawork, music, acting. Every detail is right.
More, Nora's relationship to Dennis isn't sexual at all, thoough the neighbors and her family try to imply otherwise: actually this is one of the few stories of agape (as opposed to eros) that I know of that isn't just embarrassing, it's good, possibly great. That's incredibly difficult to do, much less do well--you need a delicate touch, a sureness in your handling of details. I suspect Ozu would appreciate this film.
It's just--I don't know, if you're familiar with O'Hara's other films, he knows to what depths of sensual perversion and cruelty the human heart can plunge (after all, he wrote Insiang). Which makes him somehow credible when he tells a story of selfless, unsensual love (he knows one thing very well; he must know something of its opposite). But even if that principle doesn't hold (an extreme suggests its opposite)--look at Nora and Dennis in Bakit Bughaw ang Langit? or Nora and Dan Alvaro in Condemned--even if it isn't true that you need to know one to know the other, he knows; you can see it in his films.
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